Senior Staff Engineer - Tax Platform Engineering

Role overview

A small business platform company is hiring a Senior Staff Engineer to help shape its Tax platform, which powers payroll tax compliance for hundreds of thousands of businesses. This is a senior technical leadership role focused on scaling, modernizing, and simplifying one of the most complex and consequential systems in the product.

Responsibilities

- Design, build, and test platform capabilities that support tax compliance at scale - Help evolve large Ruby on Rails and TypeScript/React codebases for greater extensibility and scalability - Collaborate with engineering, product, design, data science, compliance, and operations on complex, ambiguous problems - Drive the technical strategy and roadmap for the team's domain area in alignment with broader OKRs - Build guardrails that enable safe use of agentic AI for tax-related work, prioritizing compliance and reliability - Improve incident response processes, tooling, and culture to raise overall system reliability - Mentor engineers through pairing, code review, and knowledge sharing, including AI-augmented development practices

Requirements

- 10+ years of experience in software engineering - Background designing and developing robust distributed systems across multiple general-purpose languages - Experience influencing work across multiple teams on scaling, refactoring, and optimizing legacy products - Track record of architecting, building, and testing large-scale production code - Ability to bring clarity and simplicity to complex and ambiguous problems - Experience building fault-tolerant, mission-critical software, ideally in regulated or high-risk domains such as payroll, taxes, or compliance - Familiarity with AI tools such as LLMs and agents, with an emphasis on embedding them into daily development workflows

Nice to have

- Hands-on experience with Ruby on Rails, TypeScript, and React

Benefits and work setup

Targeted cash compensation for the San Francisco metro area is $223,000 to $278,000 per year, with stock equity on top. The role is hybrid, with employees expected in-office roughly two to three days per week at locations in Denver, San Francisco, or New York. Full-time employees receive competitive base pay, benefits, and equity (RSUs).